Another Life_ A Memoir of Other People - Michael Korda [41]
The sheer volume of material that had to be read was daunting, but the task was essentially extracurricular, a built-in, routine burden of the profession, like getting up to go to mass in the middle of the night for a monk. Night after night, those of us who read—it was regarded as a kind of badge of honor that set us apart from people in marketing or sales, who were also, by the way, making more money than us—dragged home shopping bags full of manuscripts, always hoping to find buried somewhere in the pile a literary pearl, and morning after morning we wearily dragged them back to the office to reject them. The rejection letters ran to form and, having all been drafted by Max, were as unalterable as the Holy Writ. It was soul-destroying work, apt to turn anyone cynical, for the sad, awful truth was that there was hardly any evidence at all of talent in the slush pile and plenty of proof, for those who needed it, that the country was full of crazy people armed with typewriters—far more of them even than of crazy people armed with guns.
The worst of it was one could never get ahead of the flow—it was the lesson of King Canute, applied to paper instead of water. Perhaps even worse, nobody paid the slightest attention to these labors, which went totally unrewarded. You could read yourself blind and it wouldn’t add a penny to your paycheck.
Still, compared to editing, the reading was easy work. At least with the reading, you were buoyed, however implausibly and against all evidence, by hope. The next manuscript might, after all, prove to be a work of genius, or at any rate talent, the discovery of which can make an editor’s career overnight. Such things do happen; Bob Gottlieb had discovered Joseph Heller, after all, and Catch-22 was about to change both their lives. The element of chance is as important as that of choice. Everybody in book publishing knows that if Macmillan’s editor had not been overcome by a cold while visiting Atlanta, he wouldn’t have stayed in bed and read the huge manuscript a lady had given him in the hotel lobby, which was to become, after much editing and renaming, Gone with the Wind. Miracles do happen.
Editing a manuscript is, however, a whole different story. To begin with, the publishing house already owns the manuscript, so the basic decision has been made. Far from hope entering into it, the question is: How can we fix this? And, of course, less usefully, How on earth did we get into this in the first place, and why? There is a kind of Don Juan—like quality to reading manuscripts–the next one, or the one after, might be the love of one’s life—but editing them is a slow, painstaking effort to patch up and make presentable what has already been botched and fudged. It is possible to spend hours unraveling someone else’s prose or trying to decide what he or she was trying to say and finding some way to make the words express it without starting from scratch in one’s own words.
In editing, time becomes meaningless. A single page can sometimes absorb hours, like the most infuriating kind of puzzle. For most editors, there is no time to edit in the office, where they are caught up dealing with the problems of real live authors, talking to agents, being called to meetings, or trying to explain to the marketing people or the business people or the publicity people just what this or that book is about and why it’s important to buy it or print fifty thousand copies of it or reject it. This in turn means that editors do most of their serious work at night and over the weekends and explains why so many of the better ones eventually become publishers, if only to have some kind of social or personal life.
It is possible